The University of Wisconsin-Madison's tenth annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature will take place February 20-22, 2014. This year's conference, "Texts and Violence" engages the intersections between literature, culture, philosophy, and politics.

While grounded in literary and interpretive studies, the subject of textual violence cannot help but engage fields within the humanities, including history, art history, theater, comparative literature, architecture, and gender studies. In particular, the conference will raise questions about how these fields produce and teach critical thought, narratives, objects, bodies, and experience. To this end, we hope this conference will invite a discussion of how research in the humanities interprets, responds to, and even constructs ideas of "texts" and "violence."

The English Department Graduate Student Association (GSA) is pleased to announce that this year's keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Hillary Chute, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at University of Chicago. Her talk will take place at 7pm on February 20th at the Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus.

How have scholars and theorists shifted their thinking about literature's ability to represent and/or capture violence? What are the cultural or political implications of this?

How is violence as a concept used or viewed across disciplines? How does this impact our sense of disciplinarity?

In what ways do we deal with violence in our pedagogy? How can we help our students engage ethically with cultural texts that represent violence? How do various forms of structural violence impact our classrooms in other ways?

How does violence shape individual or collective identity? How can violence define or deconstruct community? What is the role of violence in defining our notions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and how do texts enforce or challenge these ideas?

In what way is structural violence represented, enacted, and/or contested by literary and cultural texts and discourses? Potential topics to explore include colonialism and its legacies, sexual violence, socioeconomic stratification, and the nation-state.

How do texts and discourses negotiate the often violent relationship between humans and the environment? Between humans and other species?

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to uwmadlit@gmail.com by December 15, 2013.